As most of you will know, the GNOME team is hard at work on GNOME 3.0, the first major overhaul of the platform since 2002. The release of GNOME 3.0 was originally planned for March 2010, but it has now been pushed back for six months to September 2010.

If you read the release it sounds like it is completely ready for all users. KDE 4.0 should have been released as KDE 4 DR1 (Developer Release 1). If KDE 4.0 was intended to only be a developer and advanced user release then why did they release beta-quality software with a stable-quality moniker? Why not just adopt a moniker that properly communicates the intended audience in the name?

Why were further efforts not made to run KDE 4 alongside KDE 3 during the development process? It seems to me that KDE has alienated at least part of their user base due to the way (or the perception that) they tried to force users to upgrade to KDE 4. Is there some technical reason a KDE 3.6 release could not have been made that was designed to run KDE 4 applications and allow both versions to co-exist on the same machine with no conflicts, so that users who wanted to run a completely polished KDE could do so until KDE 4 became a superior environment?

GNOME should have used DR monikers until 2.6, IMO. The GNOME community obviously felt that their previous decision to release beta-quality software with a stable-quality moniker was a mistake that they are now attempting to avoid with the GNOME 3.0 process.

Also why does KDE use a different six month release cycle than GNOME, especially in light of the fact that distros are just backporting features thereby making development more difficult for upstream?

Users usually acquire their desktop environment from distributors. It's the distributor's responsibility to only ship software that is "ready".
No matter what the release announcements from KDE.org say: Distributors need to do their own testing. They need to follow mailing lists, They need to follow dot.kde.org.

And even if KDE 4.0 had been marked as beta, what would have been the difference? At least Ubuntu and AFAIK also Fedora shipped a beta release of Firefox 3.0 as default browser.
Pretty much every current mainstream distro ships only the current beta of Thunderbird, instead of the stable 2.0 one.
PulseAudio never really worked well, hence it has a 0.x version number. Still, every distro ships it (openSUSE 11.2 disables PA for KDE, though).

So if you want to bitch against someone, bitch against the distributors who have bad or no quality assurance.

Blog posts like that one were of course aggregated through planet.kde.org, a must-read for every distributor shipping KDE -- planet.gnome.org and blog.xfce.org are must reads if a distributor ships GNOME and/or Xfce.